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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26186374">The Wonders of a Good Night's Rest</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/insanity_by_proxy/pseuds/insanity_by_proxy'>insanity_by_proxy</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Cullen and Quizzy are both a bit traumatized but they're doing their best, Domestic Fluff, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Fluff without Plot, I wrote this for me but you can read it I guess, Kinda, Literal Sleeping Together, Mage Inquisitor (Dragon Age), Mild Hurt/Comfort, No Plot/Plotless, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sharing a Bed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 05:33:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,360</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26186374</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/insanity_by_proxy/pseuds/insanity_by_proxy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"In the first days of sharing a bed with Evelyn, Cullen had attempted to sleep in the Inquisitor’s quarters with a full fire blazing in the hearth. But his subsequent nightmares had prevented either one of them from getting a decent night’s rest, and so the habit of sleeping in Cullen’s open-aired chambers was established. </i>
</p>
<p>  <i>This pattern lasted until winter truly settled upon the Frostbacks, when both the Commander and the Inquisitor woke one morning painfully cold with blue-tinged lips, and a layer of fresh snow dusting across the bedspread. ... Thus, Cullen’s bedchamber was deemed “uninhabitable” until spring."</i></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Cullen needs a cold room to sleep in, and the Inquisitor prefers to sleep with Cullen -- but sleeping in a room with a hole in the roof in the mountains is a bad idea for several reasons... A new sleeping arrangement must be found.  </p>
<p>Short and sweet and plotless. See inside for needless fluff and domesticity.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Cullen Rutherford/Female Trevelyan, Female Inquisitor/Cullen Rutherford</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>44</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Wonders of a Good Night's Rest</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I haven't written anything in months and needed to get back into the habit of crafting sentences for fiction. So mostly this was a writing exercise for my own benefit and the Cullen/Inquisitor romance was gracious enough to provide me with some inspo., but since it's fanfic -- why not share it?</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Cullen’s room was cold, much colder than the Inquisitor’s own quarters, and indeed, much colder than any other space within walls of Skyhold. It was not that Evelyn disliked the cold -- she had, in fact, become quite used to it in the months since the Inquisition had claimed the mountain-top fortress for their own. Evelyn would even say that she had come to associate the crisp sensation of chilly temperatures with the safety and comfort of home. But the hole in Cullen’s roof, and the fact that his quarters were located on the battlements, meant that the wind would howl ferociously through the gap in his ceiling and that the temperature would drop in a truly precipitous way that any other location in the keep was shielded from. All of this was to say, that there were warmer places in the keep for the Inquisitor and her Commander to take their rest, but they chose to remain in the Commander’s tower for reasons inconceivable to their friends.</p>
<p>For Evelyn, there was simply no choice to be made. Cullen slept most comfortably in his tower, so that was where she spent her nights as well. It was not that she did not like her quarters or find them comfortable – quite the opposite; Evelyn spent many of her leisure hours enjoying the view from her balcony, or the conductive warmth of her copper tub, or the selection of books that were provided generously by her friends. But even before she and Cullen had begun sharing a bed, her tower had always felt so… distant from the rest of the keep.</p>
<p>Evelyn’s life before the Conclave was spent in Ostwick’s Circle, where she often shared a room with one or more other people. And before that she had shared her bedchamber with her youngest brother at her family’s estates. In short, Evelyn had never had a room completely to herself before. After the novelty had worn off, Evelyn found it to be a strange and lonely living situation. So, it was a relief when she and Cullen finally started courting properly and the option to share a bed with another living soul became a possibility again. The cold of his room was well worth it for the comfort of having a solid shoulder to rest against, or the reassuring weight of another’s arm across her body. Besides, Cullen was warm enough on his own. He put off heat like a well-tended hearth. So, if Evelyn ever felt the nip of frost upon her, she’d just roll over and steal some of her lover’s heat.</p>
<p>For Cullen, the cold cleared his head and kept nightmares from plaguing his rest as consistently as they would otherwise. Uldred’s Rebellion at Kinloch Hold had occurred in the summer months, and Ferelden’s Tower was not the most well-ventilated building in the kingdom. While Cullen had been trapped in the magic prison, praying frantically to ward off the visions that the demons tried to tempt him with, he had cooked inside his armor. Cullen’s most distinct sensory memory of that time was the feeling of sweat dripping down his back under the layers of his robes and armor, as the screams of his friends reached his ears alongside and the enticing promises of the demons all around him.</p>
<p>And then there was Kirkwall. Kirkwall was a city that baked beneath the sun on a normal day. In the summer months it filled with humidity to the point that much of the city’s infrastructure was in constant need of patching due to the damp. It had been a point of jest amongst the lower-ranking Templars to bet upon which of the new recruits would succumb to the heat first. At least one every week would collapse under the blazing sun as they adjusted to the weight of their armor and the rigor of their duties. No matter how many times Cullen bathed or washed his face with a cool cloth, the Templar had never felt free from the clawing damp heat of Kirkwall. It was frustrating enough that Cullen remembered frequently wanting to tear his own skin off.</p>
<p>All the worst memories in Cullen’s life bore with them the imprint of heat, and now that he was finally trying to heal his old wounds and trying to build a new life and distance himself from his past, he found that a particularly warm day or a stagnant bedchamber was more likely than not to bring on a piercing headache and to draw out his nightmares from the recesses of his psyche. It had been a pleasant surprise when, in the first few weeks of inhabiting Skyhold, Cullen had achieved several nights of dreamless sleep in his new chambers where the hole in the roof allowed for cold mountain air to keep him comfortable.</p>
<p>In the first days of sharing a bed with Evelyn, Cullen had attempted to sleep in the Inquisitor’s quarters with a full fire blazing in the hearth. But his subsequent nightmares had prevented either one of them from getting a decent night’s rest, and so the habit of sleeping in Cullen’s open-aired chambers was established.</p>
<p>To say that the insistence that they sleep in a room with a hole in the roof boggled their friends, particularly the ones with finer sensibilities, would be an understatement. Vivienne and Varric finally found something to agree upon. While Dorian, Lelianna, and Josephine each conspired to have the roof fixed without Cullen noticing – an effort in which they all failed. Even Sera and Bull made a comment here and there about how odd it was to sleep under an open sky when you didn’t need to. Evelyn endured their friends’ concern with good humor, Cullen, with resignation.</p>
<p>This pattern lasted until winter truly settled upon the Frostbacks, when both the Commander and the Inquisitor woke one morning painfully cold with blue-tinged lips, and a layer of fresh snow dusting across the bedspread. It was with no small amount of satisfaction that Dorian proclaimed that the pair had come down with a mild case of hypothermia as they sat wrapped in layers of blankets and sipping tea. Thus, Cullen’s bedchamber was deemed “uninhabitable” until spring, but for major renovations that Cullen once again refused.</p>
<p>The Commander’s guilt over almost allowing the Inquisitor to freeze to death in his own bed was what eventually led to the pair returning to the Inquistor’s bedchamber. For Evelyn, this made her rooms far more comfortable, but she did not enjoy watching Cullen suffer through his nightmares. But for Evelyn’s sake, Cullen was willing to endure; after all, he had survived on little-to-no sleep for most of his adult life, just to be able to share a bed with Evelyn at all was improvement enough in his opinion.</p>
<p>But Evelyn was implacable, when a problem was placed in her path, she would find a way to fix it. And so, a solution was not long in coming. Cullen came to bed one night to find that no fire had been stoked in the hearth, and that extra blankets had been piled on top of the bed and that one of the doors out to the balcony had even been left ajar. After a moment of protest, Evelyn convinced him to try it for just one night.</p>
<p>Cullen slept soundly until morning, and neither of them woke with numb fingers or toes. And so, it wasn’t long until Cullen had moved the majority of his belongings from the rooms above his office to the Inquisitor’s tower.</p>
<p>Their friends still grumbled playfully about Cullen and Evelyn being completely mad for sleeping in a freezing cold bedchamber, but they could not deny that the technique had positive results. The bags beneath Cullen’s eyes were less pronounced, and his mood had improved considerably. Evelyn’s smiles came more easily as well, as if she were able to more fully relax when she had time to rest. Their friends would joke about the wonders of a good tumble in the sack, and the couple would merely laugh and quip back that no, it was really just the wonders of a good night’s rest.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If you enjoyed this, please say so! Something as short as "liked it!" is equally welcome to anything longer.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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